One of the most widely believed myths about meditation is that you need to clear your mind to do it - and therefore if your mind is busy you can’t be meditating ‘properly’. It’s a sad fact that this tends to put many people off what is in truth a far simpler and more deeply affecting practice than most of us realise. I practice meditation because it allows me to sit slightly outside of myself and look in at what’s going on with me - mentally, emotionally and physically. I normally don’t try to get my mind to do anything other than what it’s doing. If my mind is whirring with excitement or worry then I may give it a helping hand to calm down by focusing my attention on breathing. I try to sit for at least 10 minutes a day because it sometimes takes a good 5 minutes or so to settle into position and allow my mind to slowly settle, like sediment sinking in a glass of water. Once I’m settled I just watch. I try to observe without judging or responding to my mind’s activity, but sometimes that’s hard. When I sense my mind has drifted off, I bring it gently back into view and we repeat the watching - over and over. And really that’s it. I’ve rarely experienced a ‘clear’ mind, but a few times my mind has settled so much that all I can sense is my heart beat.

Yoga describes a number of stages in approaching meditation. There is Pratyahara where we withdraw our senses from outside. You can cover or close your eyes, and put fingers into your ears to draw your sight and hearing inwards. From there we add a focal point - perhaps the breath or a mantra. This is Dharana and helps to still the mind as it has one focus. This is where mindfulness practice, meditation’s more accessible cousin, comes in - absorbing our mind into the body and breath. From this stillness we can then move into meditation itself - watching ourselves in Dhyana. The aim of yoga is to still mental chatter. The aim of meditation is to see who we really are when the mind, and particularly our ego, has stilled.

I experience a similar process in freediving. I close my eyes and focus on my breath to draw myself inwards in preparation for a dive. As soon as I’m underwater it’s quiet and still. I feel present in my body as I’m swimming and so experience less of that observing status compared to meditation.

But in static apnea, when I lie face down in the water, my meditation practice comes to the fore. When the urge to breath comes along I try to identify it as a thought and give it a label, such as ‘need to breathe’. I can then consciously ask myself ‘Do I need to breathe?’. For some time that answer can be no, and I try to let go of the thought and label as the urge subsides. And this is repeated over and over. Obviously a point comes when the answer is ‘Yes!’ and its time to come out of the breath-hold and return to the land of breathing. Despite the discomfort of moving through the urges to breathe, I always feel stilled after practising statics, just as I do in meditation. I’ve certainly learnt a lot about myself by meditating and freediving. I believe we can often reach mental and emotional stillness, and self-awareness, by going through discomfort than trying to avoid it. Learn meditation and other yoga techniques for diving on a luxury weekend retreat in April - read more hereor try the online programme